Beloved

Toni Morrison

Part Three: Chapters 27–28

Key Facts

1.

124 was
spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.

Each of Beloved’s three
parts begins with an observation about 124, the
house occupied by Sethe and her daughter Denver. Part One of the
novel begins with this quotation, Part Two with “124 was loud,”
and Part Three with “124 was quiet.” 124 is
haunted by the abusive and malevolent spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter.
When the novel opens, the ghost rages with a fury that is most definitely
a baby’s. In Chapter 5, however,
the baby ghost manifests herself in the form of Beloved, who seems
to be a reincarnation of the baby Sethe murdered eighteen years
ago. As the novel progresses, Beloved will become more powerful,
until, in Chapter 19, she is said to wield
the force of a collective “black and angry dead.” The spirit will
wreak havoc on 124 until the community exorcises
Beloved in Chapter 26.

2.

White
people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin
was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons,
sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In
a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks
brought with them to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks
planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until it invaded the
whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even
they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.
The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums
were their own.

In Chapter 19,
at the beginning of Part Two, Stamp Paid considers the ways in which
slavery corrupts and dehumanizes everyone who comes in contact with
it, including the white slave owners. It makes them fearful, sadistic,
and raving. For example, one could say that schoolteacher’s perverse
lessons and violent racism exist because they are his means of justifying
the institution of slavery. In his thoughts, Stamp Paid depicts
the jungle from a white person’s point of view—as awesome, exotic,
and thrilling. He perceives anxiety on the part of the whites about
the unknown, unintelligible, “unnavigable” psyche of the slaves
they steal. The sense of anxiety is emphasized by the images of
wild consumption in the passage—jungles growing and spreading, red
gums ready for blood. The conclusion of this passage asserts that
what the whites recognize and run from is in fact their own savagery.
They project this savagery onto those whom they perceive to be their
opposites—“the Other.” The passage derives its power from the way
Morrison moves the images of the jungle around, so that, by the
end, the whites are the ones who hide a jungle under their skin;
they are consuming themselves.

3.

Saying
more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from.
He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried
in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.

In Chapter 7,
Paul D begins sharing his painful memories with Sethe, but he fears
that revealing too much will wrench the two former slaves back into
a past from which they might never escape. Both Sethe and Paul D
avoid the pain of their past as best they can, and both have developed
elaborate and ultimately destructive coping mechanisms to keep the
past at bay. Sethe has effectively erased much of her memory, and
Paul D functions by locking his memories and emotions away in his
imagined “tobacco tin.” The rustiness of the tin contributes to
the reader’s sense of the inaccessibility and corrosiveness of Paul
D’s memories. His separation from his emotions means he is alienated
from himself, but Paul D is willing to pay the price to keep himself
from his painful and turbulent past. When Paul D is forced to confront
the past during his erotic encounter with Beloved, the rusted lid
of his heart begins to break open. At the end of the novel, Paul
D reveals that he is willing finally to risk emotional safety and
open himself to another person, to love Sethe.

4.

. . [I]f you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and
stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be
there, waiting for you . . . [E]ven though it’s all over—over and
done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you.

This passage is from Chapter 3.
In her “emerald closet,” Denver remembers what Sethe once told about
the indestructible nature of the past. According to Sethe’s theory
of time, past traumas continue to reenact themselves indefinitely,
so it is possible to stumble into someone else’s unhappy memory.
Accordingly, although Sethe describes for Denver what “was,” she
turns to the future tense and tells her that the past will “always
be there waiting for you.” Sethe pictures the past as a physical
presence, something that is “there,” that fills a space. Beloved’s
arrival confirms this notion of history’s corporeality.

The force of the past is evident even in the difficulty
Sethe has speaking about it. She stutters, backtracks, and repeats
herself as though mere words cannot do justice to her subject matter.
Even in this passage, as she warns Denver against the inescapability
of the past, Sethe enacts and illustrates the very phenomenon she describes.
She repeats her warning several times in a manner that demonstrates
the recurrence of ideas and her inability to leave past thoughts
behind. Sethe’s warnings are the main cause of Denver’s fears of
leaving 124 and of the community. Only in
Chapter 26 does Denver finally venture out
alone. She realizes that even if she succeeds in preventing chance
encounters with the past, the past may nevertheless actively begin
to come after her.

5.

And
if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She
just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts
of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed,
dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one
could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would
be safe.

After Paul D learns about Sethe’s crime
from Stamp Paid in Chapter 18, he goes to 124 in
search of an explanation. This passage, although written in the
third person, records Sethe’s thoughts. Sethe saw the decision she
made as “simple.” She wanted to secure her children’s safety, to
send them “over there” into the afterlife rather than let them be
pulled back to Sweet Home with schoolteacher. Sethe’s passion for
her children, which infuses so much of the novel, shines through
in this passage with particular clarity. The moment Sethe’s reason
reduced itself to instinct, her language broke down as well: she
recalls her words as “No. No. Nono. Nonono.” For her, the border
between life and death is tenuous, nothing more than a screen or
“veil” that she hopes to place in front of her children.

Another significant aspect of the passage is Sethe’s identification of
her children as “the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful”;
for Sethe, to allow schoolteacher to take her children would be
to allow him to destroy everything that is good in herself, to destroy
all the “life” she had made. According to this understanding, Sethe’s
murder of her daughter seems a less legally and morally reprehensible
crime because it becomes an act of self-defense. Yet the question
of Sethe’s guilt is never fully settled in the book. The characters
debate the morality of her act in pointed language, but Morrison
herself withholds judgment on the deed. Throughout the book, she
focuses her criticisms instead on the forces of slavery that led
Sethe to kill her own daughter. In this passage and elsewhere, Morrison
condemns slavery as an institution so perverse that it could mutate
a mother’s love into murder.

The scene treated in this analysis is from Toni Morrison's Beloved. It is situated where Paul D, a former slave is captured and deported together with forty-fife other prisoners and where they successfully manage to escape. All quotations will be from the following scene :

It rained.
Snakes came down from short-leaf pine and hemlock.
It rained.
Cypress, yellow poplar, ash and palmetto drooped under five days of rain without wind. By the eighth day the doves were nowhere in sight, by the ninth even the salamanders wer

1. What according to you are some of the main themes in the novel?
2. How is the idea of masculinity been portrayed in the novel?
3. What are some of the main literally devices that Morrison has used to make the novel more effective?

4. What according to you has been a point of significance in the novel?
5. In terms of characters, who have you found the most effective?